Park of the week

211. St Pancras Gardens

This open space was once part of the burial ground of St Pancras Old Church, adjacent to the public garden. The churchyard was enlarged in 1727 and again in 1792, and St Giles-in-the-Fields burial ground opened in 1802 to the north. Burials ended in the 1850’s and in the 1860s, when the railway was brought into St Pancras it cut a path through the old churchyard. The land re-opened as a public park in the 1870’s.

There's more to look at than I have space to write about, so you'll need to visit yourselves to see everything. It includes this drinking fountain, presented in 1877.

There are also a number of interesting graves. Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founding feminist philosophers and mother of author Mary Shelley was buried here, with her husband William Godwin and his second wife Mary Jane Godwin. Later, the remains moved to Bournemouth for reburial so the tomb is empty.

The architect Sir John Soane (the Bank of England is probably his best-known work) is buried here in the family mausoleum that he designed after his wife’s death in 1815. Some say that it inspired the shape of the K9 red telephone box.

In the days before London expanded to surround St Pancras churchyard, the churchyard was a target for grave robbers, who dug up freshly interred bodies and sold them to doctors for medical dissection. The church gained a sinister reputation, one known to Charles Dickens, who used the burial ground in A Tale of Two Cities as the site where Jerry Cruncher brings his young son to do a spot of 'fishing' (digging up recently buried bodies). I love this name – Dickens’s work is full of them. I try to name my characters and places after those in Marx Brothers films if I can find one that isn’t an obvious joke. 

This sundial was placed in the gardens in 1877 to commemorate the dignitaries whose graves were upturned by the railway. It was paid for by Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, one of the richest women in Victorian England and a prominent local benefactor. She was, in 1871, the first woman to be given a peerage. Dickens dedicated Martin Chuzzlewit to her.

Judith Field

St Pancras Gardens, Pancras Rd, London NW1 1UL